Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. Allen is the co-Founding Editor of Book of Matches literary journal. She is an award-wining poet, editor, and dancer. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and she is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her collections include Otherwise, Soft White Ash (2012), Imagine Not Drowning (C&R Press 2017), Banjo’s Inside Coyote (C&R Press 2019), and Leaving the Skin on the Bear (C&R Press, 2022). Her book, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, was rereleased Fall 2026 by C&R Press. She currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. Her website is here.
About Otherwise, Soft White Ash, by Kelli Allen
In this rerelease of Kelli Allen’s first collection of poetry and short fiction, with a new foreword by Brian Turner, readers are asked to consider how grief and longing continuously occupy the same hut. Allen’s work explores how loss, myth, sexual desire, and the wild journey inward come to shape capital S-Story.
In this rerelease of Kelli Allen’s first collection of poetry and short fiction, with a new foreword by Brian Turner, readers are asked to consider how grief and longing continuously occupy the same hut. Allen’s work explores how loss, myth, sexual desire, and the wild journey inward come to shape capital S-Story.
You can read more about Otherwise, Soft White Ash on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.
From Otherwise, Soft White Ash
Clearing Materials of Exile
Hunter and hermit both dissolve bitter with sugar cubes stolen
from cut glass jars, though neither always remembers the theft.
Each extends then wraps dirt dried fingers around the weak sweet crystals,
mouths diminished in the metal mirror hanging loose in the old barn.
Humiliation is an Easter horse moving directly behind us like some brutal,
selfish child whispering I want my supper while chewing weeds and apples.
We cross one border to move closer to another, as the dark crow
in our coat pocket closes his eyes, and we are allowed to sleep.
The priest ignores the ark in his woods because he is busy absorbing his shadow,
and the animals know their work is to hide every egg like dark stones meant for the river.
Noon, Like Whiplash
Every episode of self-imposed solitude,
the moments when she would lock herself
into a room sometimes for hours, often
for days, would always be followed
by extravagant gestures meant to breed
forgetfulness. My closets were alive
with texture and ocular romance.
I was treated to shopping trips,
which included purchasing original
designs from the best shops
in whatever city we happened to be living
at the time. There were expensive chocolates,
gorgeous piles of books, cosmetics, shoes,
any articles of expression or indulgence
she could hope might make it easier
for me to blanket the segments
of disaster her erratic attentions
invariably caused. I allowed this
behavior for so many years
that I no longer feel a prickle
of shame when I find myself pressed
against remembering.
What else could we do,
this single child and her raging
mother offering gift after gift
from a silver horn? The whole
is never far, and one fraud
is as easily dressed in silk as another.
The extravagance ended entirely
for one year when I was seventeen
and found myself wearing so much
of my mother’s blood that the new pale
yellow sweater I adored became lost
in awkward blossoms of sticky red.
I remember cashmere softness before
I begin to usher in flashes of the surreal
scene of her fourth suicide attempt. Memory
is unfaithful to intention, catapulting
what we should recognize far
from what our cognizance vividly defends.
There is no room for apology
at any moment in the scene, neither
when it unfurled as quick thin tentacles
or now, when recollection feels viscous
and tastes of paint left to dry on a lid.
While tracking the minutes
from the call to the sound
of the gangly ambulance halting
near my mother’s window, I focused
on the saturation spreading peripherally
down my own arms, soaking
the delicate fibers of my daffodil sweater.
There was a pattern forming over
my forearms and onto the top layer
of lemongrass-shaded sheets
my mother bought to match a vase
with similar colored latticework
snaking around and through its glass.
In those twenty-six minutes when I pushed
my hands into her wet arms and waited
for whatever help would arrive
through sirens and stillness, I felt
as though there were streaks of rain
pelting far too slowly against my face
and back. There was more wetness
in that waiting than what could be
described as measurable pain. The shape
of her was an indication that something more
had gone wrong, but I was lost in the absence
of humming, and the reticence was a film
like thin stained glass—fragile
and something to be irrationally trusted.
The reality of blood strips all defenses
into patience, calculations descending
into calm like knowing the old gods
are present and full. Silence
can be its own kind of vertigo,
and there is nothing so quiet
as keeping your mother alive
and not being certain that you should.
When her veins were finally bound
and there seemed to be a cessation
of rushing, both of fluid and breath,
I finally looked at her face. The paramedics
had obscured her mouth and nose
with a dome of plastic and whatever color
was left clinging to her skin
seemed temporal and cheap.
The sheets on her bed were beautiful,
and watching her blood deploy itself
over the quiet sheen of the cotton
was a betrayal of sorts. I imagined
she would wake at any moment; her mouth
opening in an impossible "O," and hordes
of butterflies would emerge and become her hair.
